The present invention relates generally to electronic publishing, and more particularly, to publishing and rendering an electronic publication in a fixed layout.
Today, the world of electronic publications enjoys increasing consumer awareness spurred by the recent availability of consumer electronic reader devices, or e-reader devices, such as those commercially available from well-known companies such as Apple, Barnes and Noble, and Sony. Electronic publishing data format standards have been developed and are being developed to provide publishers with a standardized set of rules and instructions for publishing electronic publications for different e-reader device platforms. An example of such a standard is the Electronic Publication (EPUB) standard developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). A current release of the ePub standard, 2.0.1, is available online at www.idpf.org.
Current electronic publishing data format standards are designed for re-flowable content and do not inherently support fixed layouts. This means that e-reader devices following these standards move visual content (e.g., text and images) from one page to another as necessary to fit visual content to the size of the e-reader device display screen and according user preferences. For example, current standards allow users to change the font or font size of text to suit their preferences. As the font or font size changes, an e-reader device may re-flow text as necessary so that the width of a line of text is no longer than the width of the screen thereby preventing the user from having to scroll or pan horizontally to read lines of the book. This may also result in visual content on a page re-flowing to the previous or next page or visual content on the previous or next pages re-flowing to a currently displayed page. Further, to mimic the behavior of actual physical books, many e-reader devices present visual content on pages that are displayed entirely on the screen of the e-reader device so that the user is not required to scroll or pan vertically when reading. As a result, if the font or font size is changed by the user, visual content initially on one page may re-flow to another page.
The re-flowable behavior of current standards and current e-reader devices is generally acceptable to publishers when the electronic publication consists largely of text with few or no images or images that are to be presented inline within text. However, some publishers may wish to publish an electronic publication in which the layout of visual content is fixed on pages and does not re-flow inter-page. Cookbooks, travel books, photography books, children's books, and other image intensive books are examples of types of electronic publications where a fixed layout may be desirable.
One possible solution to creating a fixed layout electronic publication is to capture or create a digital image of each entire page. An e-reader device may then display each image to the reader. However, this solution is less than optimal because the text of the page captured in an image typically would not be available as text data to useful text-based capabilities of many e-reader devices such as searching, bookmarking, highlighting and passage sharing. Further, if the dimensions of an image are not proportional to the dimensions e-reader device display, the e-reader device may split the image over multiple pages resulting in an unappealing presentation of the publication.
Based on the foregoing, it is clearly desirable to help publishers create fixed layout electronic publications in which a fixed relationship between visual content and pages may be maintained in e-reader device displays and in which text content is available to the e-reader devices as text data. The present invention fulfills these and other needs.